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ON CAPICOSTIA: SOME HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON, DC'S OLD SOUTHEAST

  

What white people wouldn't DO for a swellegant river view in 1959 Anacostia! [Photo from D.C. Public Library]

There really was a time, before President Kennedy left Washington, DC's Georgetown for a big, white house on Pennsylvania Avenue, and tailfins on Chevrolet Impalas were stabbing Wallies and Georgies in the chest, ..when the people Downtown didn't think living east of the Anacostia River was so crummy.

"...This was back when Southeast was just a bustling country town across a soggy, dirty ditch from the nation's capital. Southeast was a half-mythic Southern hamlet writ large, thousands of emigrant crackers from all over Dixie crammed on a hill in one big neighborhood, where everyone knew each other's name and dirty little secrets—and the black folks and the crazies knew their place.

Back when white people still lived east of the Anacostia River. But all this is getting ahead of the story.

Right now, we're in Strick's, a broken-down bar just across the District line in Prince George's County. There are many such dying beer joints—Helen's Tavern, Ray's Bar and Grill, the Senate Inn—dives dotting the highways that radiate from Southeast like crooked spokes. More clubhouses than businesses, the bars are refuges where stubbled geezers bored by their local VFWs can talk about the days before white flight. For years, blacks weren't welcome in places like Strick's, and decades have done little..."

This really happened. This was River East, once.

Eddie Dean gives us the skinny on how white people were all up in that Sowfeest, way back when, ..in A Brief History Of White People In Southeast .

Posted by Capicostia


Edgar Miraculous (Mel) Dyer, Capicostia's publisher, without his fine, coyote-hatin' Goldiweiller, Kirby (now moved on to that big, coyote-hatin' hate group in the Sky) continues a somewhat bleaker, dogless existence in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC. He has been an active member of the Latino Culture Council of the Capitol Area (El Consejo de Cultura Latina – La Zona del Capitolio), the Kiwanis Club of Capitol Hill and the Board of Directors for both Total Care Services, Inc. and YMCA Capital View.

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